Kane

The Haven will be mine.

I smooth the old blueprint, paid for with lives, of the underground survival complex—that fortified stronghold with its modest cabin hiding so much. My sister, faithless bitch that she is, sleeps somewhere in the earth beneath it, her blood carrying the cure. When I’ve got what I want from her, what Great Nation America needs, she and that whole dago family who own the place will be underground, permanently.

Once I control the Haven, nothing can stop me. I’ll be on my way to the White House. Anticipation makes my hands prickle with eagerness. I roll up the blueprint to hide it.

“Take a team of four. Recon the place. Find their weaknesses. And don’t let them see you.”

“Thought you’d never give the word.” Jackson, my right hand, grins like a wolf scenting fresh meat.

“We had to get set up. This base is even better than the other one.” I look around the dim, cool office. Stone walls protect and enclose me, a good feeling. “I’m sure they’ve got weaknesses. We’ve just got to find them. Now, go.” I flick a hand at him.

“You got it, Boss.” Jackson wheels and leaves, calling for his favorite scouts.

Roan

Tanning a hide shouldn’t make me think of her—but these days, everything makes me think of Lucy. I stroke the silky brown-and-gray fur. Her skin is even softer.

I need to focus on my cabin, not a woman I can never have.

The place still smells a little musty, but each week it gets better as I work on the restoration. Breaking away from the busyness at the Haven, my friend JT’s nearby survival complex, doesn’t feel like betrayal now that the first wave of devastation from Scorch Flu has passed. Ninety percent of the population succumbed to that terrifying flu—a fever so high they call it the Scorching, a cough so deadly that victims drown in their own immune reaction.

Things are finally settling, at least in our area. The bodies are buried, and we’ve begun to rebuild.

But long before this apocalypse, my heritage was stolen and fell into ruin. I’m taking it back. I don’t need the Haven or its people, never did.

Every corner of this simple cabin is filled with memories: the kitchen area with its squat black cook stove where Grandfather prepared meals. The room at the rear where we slept, his snores rattling the windows. The living area, anchored by a wood-burning stove where we sat in the evenings, as Grandfather wove pine needle baskets or beaded while I did the prep work. The tiny closet where he locked me in when I refused to speak.

Terror of small spaces still haunts my dreams.

Grandfather died out here, refusing to leave when the government annexed the cabin as part of a buffer zone around what became the Haven. Ranting and protesting, he expired from a heart attack when they tried to move him by force.

At least, that’s the story they told me in prison.

I shake my head to clear it.

I’ve spent most of the summer building a bathroom with a flush toilet and installing a clay sink with a faucet in the kitchen. Both have gravity-fed tanks I fill from the pump out front, but it is a luxury compared to when I grew up. With those major projects done, I’m curing this stash of rabbit hides and sewing them together for a bed covering.

As if she’d ever join me on something so humble…

But I’m not doing it for Lucy.

This is for me.

I retrieve the last two rabbit skins, already stretched over a frame and drying in a box closed off to animals. I’ve got a jar of brains from hunting that I’ll use to tan them. The substance is soft and cold, pale and waxy, the texture of tofu.

The sun is warming the clearing on this fresh spring day. I strip off my buckskin shirt to avoid getting any tanning materials on it and drape it over a low rocking chair. Grandfather and I made that chair, and a matching one, the year he brought me here.

That there’s even one chair left on this porch is a miracle.

I suspend the rabbit skin, fur down and hide up, over the square wooden beam of the hitching post in front of the cabin. The beam is set at waist height, and positioned near the water pump.

“Try not to lean over when you’re tanning,” Grandfather taught me. “Your arms and back are going to get tired enough from the scraping.”

He was right about that. For all his cruelty, Grandfather was often right, even about women.

“They’re all out to get something,” he warned. “They’ll stab you in the back and take your last meal, like your grandma did to me.” Grandfather liked to point at the scar she’d left, just above the kidney, on the left side of his back. An inch lower and she’d have killed him. She disappeared after that, leaving him to raise my mother—who grew up to be just another disappointment.

I was the unwanted offspring of an illicit affair between her and a white man—both of whom abandoned me at the hospital. I went straight into foster care as an infant, and that system is a good idea that doesn’t always work. By the time I started school, I’d spent time in over a dozen homes.

“He has selective mutism,” the school psychologist told my foster parents. “He will need special therapies.” I never got the speech therapy, but it wouldn’t have mattered because silence was my armor and identity.

By the time Grandfather decided to take me in when I was twelve, I’d all but forgotten how to speak.

“Your mother was a worthless bitch who spread her legs for a white man,” he told me that first day he brought me to this cabin. “She died giving birth to you, and it was what she deserved.”

Worse than being abandoned, I’d killed my mother! The hope that had bloomed in my chest at finally being adopted, and by someone from my tribe, my own grandfather… That hope shriveled, charred to ash by the contempt in his dark eyes.

Grandfather took my silence as a project. He set about breaking it, peeling my protection off and hauling me out by force.

Love is never free.

The Lucianos love generously, especially Lucy. She gives love away like there is an infinite supply, as easy to find as warmth from the sun. Lucy would give the shirt off her back to the people left alive in North Fork—or even to me.

But I don’t deserve that love, so seemingly unconditional.

I know better. Love has a price tag, and the cost for Lucy’s love is to return it in the same measure.

I’m incapable of that.

I’m not the last man standing in North Fork. She can do a hell of a lot better than me, with where I’ve been. What I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. She just doesn’t get it.

I walk away but she just keeps coming after me, teasing me with that mouth I want to taste, making me hungry with those long, bouncy black curls I crave to grab, and damn her hot body—she’s built like a tiny Venus.

I scoop a glob of brains out and rub it into the stiff rabbit hide. The smell is something I’ve learned to block out.

Taking a six-inch metal flange, the edge of a car bumper that I cut for the purpose, I begin scraping the hide, periodically wetting it with more water from a bucket I pumped.

Working up a sweat, I begin another layer of scraping, flipping the skin and working from the opposite end. It takes at least four passes to work the hide to the softness I want: soft as butter. Soft as Lucy’s skin.

My wolf, Shadow, raises his head off the porch and pricks his ears. Adelle, my Appaloosa, is staked out peacefully cropping grass, but she doesn’t so much as lift her head.

“What is it, boy?”

Shadow watches the forest trail leading to the cabin, a path I’ve avoided adding wear to, making sure it’s obscured.

Whatever’s out there can’t be anything serious or he’d go investigate, so I keep working the hide. I scrape again, from the top, moving hard and fast, letting exercise unwind the knot that always seems to be in my gut.

But nothing ever unravels it completely.